However, there are five main reasons to have a monthly safety meeting that will help to improve your team overall. Not to mention it fulfills your duty as an employer to continuously promote health and safety in the workplace.
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Continuous promotion of health and safety on your dairy
Having your team together once a month helps to ensure you are always keeping health and safety at the forefront of your operations. Has anything happened recently you thought you should discuss with the team – but then forgot?
Is there an improvement you think could be made to a procedure that might provide for better animal care as well as improved safety for team members? Keep a running list of these things, and then you can discuss the entirety of it with your team.
Knowing you are going to meet will help give you a reason to write down those ideas. Discussion and brainstorming with your team will increase buy-in on new ideas you have and might end up increasing efficiency in an area you didn’t think was possible.
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Safety-conscious workplace culture
Discussing health and safety on a regular basis will begin to change behaviours on your farm. Employees will start to recognize safety concerns more often and will be thinking about the implications of their actions on their health and safety, as well as on that of others, on a regular basis.
This will help lead to increased compliance with safe work practices on a daily basis. By keeping safety at the top of your list, your team will think twice about taking a short cut, especially when they hear about what almost happened to a team member last week during your monthly meeting.
Let this meeting be an open discussion where team member participation and discussion is encouraged. Ideas, thoughts, concerns and questions will flow freely, and you will be amazed at the lasting effect it has outside of the meeting.
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Places significance
We make time for what is important. Is the safety of your team important to you? The safety of your team may well be the most important thing to you, but do they think so?
By taking time to talk about safety, you are actively working towards it on your dairy rather than it being something simply talked about as a formality.
Health and safety is sometimes seen by employees as a waste of time and something their boss does just because they’re “supposed to.” By taking a little time out of the workday to discuss these issues, it demonstrates to employees how serious a matter it is in the workplace, thus changing behaviours and views. Lead by example; if you demonstrate the importance, others will follow.
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Learning opportunity
These meetings can help bring to the floor areas of concern in the workplace. Employees will be more apt to bring issues to their supervisor or employer when they know those concerns will be heard and taken seriously; what better time than a meeting dedicated to just that?
Also, should a near-miss or incident have occurred, this is a learning opportunity to discuss why it happened and how it could have been prevented.
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Team member morale
With recent changes to minimum wage happening in Ontario, producers are increasingly concerned with attracting and retaining talent. We need to look at and put serious thought into how to keep our people and make sure they love coming to work each day.
A meeting about safety isn’t only communicating safety concerns and rules. Some hot coffee or a lunch provided to eat together will build your team’s attitude towards their positions.
They will have time to talk to you about things they maybe haven’t had a chance to and will appreciate very much the time you took to spend with them.
By holding a monthly team meeting to discuss safety, you can increase many things, including the most important goal we have as employers: to keep our team happy, safe and healthy. 
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Danielle Pasztor
- Farm Safety Specialist & HR Consultant
- PeopleManagement Group Inc.
- Email Danielle Pasztor
